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Episode 133: Essential Writing Tips: Get to Know Your Characters

Hey Christian Indies,

We’re kicking off a new series this week entitled, “Essential Writing Tips.” With this series, we hope to really dig into the “first things first” elements of writing. This week, we’re starting with getting to know your characters. 

You might wonder, “how am I supposed to get to know an imaginary person?”  or, “why would you bother to do so?”

In response, I offer this challenge; think about your favorite character from a book. Now, imagine you learn the author is planning to kill that person off in the next novel.

[Read more…] about Episode 133: Essential Writing Tips: Get to Know Your Characters

Episode 99: Indescribable, #2 – Improving Setting Descriptions in your writing

Hey there, Christian Indies,

The first time I really thought about descriptive language was when I learned the song “America, The Beautiful.” I loved the phrases, “amber waves of grain,” and “purple mountain majesties.” The impact of those beautiful images set to that tune wells up inside me whenever I see something majestic and grand in God’s creation. I understand that the composer of the song was trying to find a way to talk about that feeling, and the best way to do that was to describe what he saw.
I want to be able to capture a scene in that sort of poetic way. Alas, I find it difficult to get beyond, “the pavement was slick,” or some such thing. How can I flex (and grow!) my scenery description muscle?

Tune in to find out.

See you there, 

Jamie

Episode 98: Indescribable: Improving Physical Descriptions in your writing






Hey Christian Indies!
Have you ever stared into a swimming pool? Or a pool of rainwater, collected on the sidewalk? What about the pool of condensation on the corner of your coffee table?
You haven’t?
I haven’t, either.
But, I’ve noticed my protagonists love staring into pools – big brown ones, icy blue ones, deep amber ones – they seem to delight in lovingly gazing into them all.
Of course, I’m talking about human eyes, so often described in literature as “pools.” 
The other hosts and I were talking about this oddity, and it seemed the situation was chronic – their characters, too, spent an inordinate amount of time staring into pools. Eventually, we discovered the problem was not with our characters, but with us, the writers. We’d gotten into an eyeball description rut: we’d run into a staring scene, and, well, the word, “pools” was just convenient. It was also familiar, “tried and true,” if you will, guaranteed not to raise brows. 

The more we  examined this issue, the more we realized that  eyes were not the only physical feature we had difficulty describing with any sort of originality whatsoever.
Thus, episode #98 was born. In it, we hope to broaden your (and our own!) horizons, so to speak, when it comes to providing physical descriptions of characters in (y)our novels.
See you on the podcast,
Jamie






			
			
			
			                
                

                
                

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